Beginner’s Guide to the robots.txt File for SEO and Best Practice
If you run a website, you’ve probably heard of the robots.txt file before. This plain text file lives in the root directory of your site and gives instructions to search engine robots about which pages they can and cannot crawl.
Understanding and properly configuring your robots.txt file is an important part of any good SEO strategy.
When used correctly, it can help you improve your search rankings by controlling which pages Google and other search bots are allowed to index.
In this beginner’s guide, I’ll explain everything you need to know about the robots.txt file and how to leverage it for better SEO.
Read on to learn about robots.txt syntax, best practices for crafting your file, common mistakes to avoid, and more!
What Exactly is a robots.txt File?
A robots.txt file is a simple text file that gives search bots instructions about crawling your site. It uses the Robots Exclusion Protocol, which is an agreement that well-behaved search engine robots will obey the directives in your robots.txt.
The file typically contains this directives:
- User-agent: Tells the robot or bots the directives apply to
- Disallow: Tells bots not to crawl or index the specified URLs
- Allow: Tells which pages or directory is allowed to crawl
- Sitemap: https://pixelsproutdigital.com/sitemap.xml
For example:
- User-agent: Googlebot
- Disallow: /private-pages/
This would tell the Google crawler not to index any pages in the /private-pages/ directory.
Why Do You Need a robots.txt File?
There are a few key reasons why every website should have a robots.txt file:
- It lets you control which pages search engines can crawl and index
- You can block pages you don’t want appearing in search results
- It helps prevent bots from overloading your server
- It improves your site’s SEO by focusing crawl on important pages
- While not having a robots.txt won’t hurt your site, taking the time to properly configure one can provide valuable benefits.
Best Practices for Your robots.txt File
Follow these best practices when creating or editing your robots.txt file: Adhere to these recommended guidelines when making or modifying your robots.txt file:
1. Place It in the Root Directory
Your robots.txt file must be in the top-level or root directory of your site. For example, https://www.pixelsproutdigital.com/robots.txt. This is the first location search bots will look when crawling your site.
Here’s a sample robots.txt file:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /private/
Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /login/
This file tells search engine crawlers to not index or follow links to any pages within the “private”, “admin”, or “login” directories on your website.
You can customize the robots.txt file to fit the specific needs of your website and ensure certain pages or directories are not indexed by search engines.
2. Make Sure It’s Publicly Accessible
You can check if your robots.txt file can be publicly accessed by simply entering your website’s URL followed by /robots.txt into a web browser. For example, if your website is www.pixelsproutdigital.com, you can enter www.pixelsproutdigital.com/robots.txt into your browser’s address bar.
If the file is publicly accessible, it should display the contents of your robots.txt file in the browser window without requiring any login or credentials.
If you want to ensure that bots can read your file, you can also use a robots.txt tester tool, such as the one provided by Google Search Console, to confirm that it can be accessed by search engine crawlers.
3. Be Selective With Your Disallows
It’s important to strike a balance between protecting sensitive information and allowing search engines to access and index your site effectively.
When using the robots.txt file to block content, be sure to only do so when it is absolutely necessary and avoid blocking large sections of your site without a good reason.
This can negatively impact your site’s visibility and ranking in search results. Only disallow specific pages or directories that contain sensitive information or are not meant to be indexed by search engines.
Keep in mind that search engines prioritize providing valuable and relevant content to users, so blocking too much content can result in penalties and decreased visibility for your site.
4. Don’t Block Site Maps or XML Sitemaps
Allowing bots to access your sitemap files is a simple and effective way to ensure that search engines can easily discover and index all of the new and updated content on your site. To do this, you can simply upload your sitemap files to the root directory of your website and ensure that they are accessible to all bots by not blocking them in your robots.txt file.
By allowing bots to access your sitemap files, you can help to ensure that your site is regularly crawled and indexed by search engines, which can result in improved visibility and rankings in search results. Additionally, this can also help to ensure that your most important and up-to-date content is being properly recognized and displayed in search engine results pages.
Overall, allowing bots to access your sitemap files is a simple but important step in ensuring that your site is being properly indexed and discovered by search engines.
5. Disallow Irrelevant Pages
Crawling should be focused on pages that are relevant to search engines and search traffic. This means prioritizing pages that contain valuable and unique content that is likely to be indexed and ranked in search results.
To do this, it is important to use the “Disallow” directive in the robots.txt file to block search engines from crawling and indexing pages that are not relevant for search traffic. This can include pages such as contact forms, login pages, infinite scroll content, or any other pages that do not contain valuable and unique content for search engines.
By using the “Disallow” directive strategically, you can help focus the crawling on pages that are most likely to drive organic search traffic and improve the overall search visibility of your website.
6. Test Your File Before Launching
Use Google’s robots.txt testing tool to validate your file and see exactly how Googlebot interprets your directives. This allows you to catch mistakes before bots crawl your site.
To use Google’s robots.txt testing tool, follow these steps:
- Go to Google’s robots.txt testing tool (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/robots-testing-tool).
- Enter the URL of your website’s robots.txt file in the text box provided.
- Click on the “Test” button.
- Google will then analyze your robots.txt file and display any errors or warnings that it finds.
- Review the results to see how Googlebot interprets your directives and make any necessary changes to your robots.txt file.
By using this tool, you can ensure that your robots.txt file is properly configured and that Googlebot will be able to crawl your site effectively.
Common Robots.txt Mistakes to Avoid
It’s easy to accidentally block important pages or configure directives incorrectly. Watch out for these common robots.txt mistakes:
- Blocking your entire site with “Disallow: /”
- Forgetting the user-agent for directives
- Misspelling URLs or directories
- Blocking vital content like category and tag archives
- Accidentally preventing access to your sitemap
- Allowing bots to crawl irrelevant pages
Double check your work to avoid indexing issues or traffic drops after changing your robots.txt file.
Answering Key Robots.txt Questions
Here are answers to some of the most frequently asked questions about the robots.txt file:
Does Every Site Need a robots.txt File?
No, a robots.txt file is not required. However, it’s considered a best practice to have one configured properly. Most sites benefit from selectively blocking some pages.
Where Do I Upload My robots.txt File?
Upload your robots.txt file to the root folder of your live site. This is usually the same place where your homepage’s index file (e.g. index.html) is located.
How Do I Know If a Page Is Blocked by robots.txt?
Use Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools to see if your important pages have been indexed. Pages blocked by robots.txt typically won’t appear in search results.
What Happens If I Have No robots.txt File?
With no robots.txt file, bots will crawl and index all pages on your site. This means pages you may not want indexed could appear in search results.
Can a Bad robots.txt File Hurt My Rankings?
Yes, incorrectly blocking important content pages can cause issues. Make sure not to block any vital pages that you want search engines to index.
Leveraging Robots.txt for Better SEO
When configured properly, your robots.txt file can help improve your SEO in a few key ways:
- Focus crawl: Prevent bots from wasting time crawling irrelevant pages like contact forms, searches, etc. This allows them to index more of your important content instead.
- Speed up site crawling: Blocking pages with endless scroll, huge product catalogs, or slow-loading media lets bots finish crawling your site faster.
- Hide confidential data: Use directives to block private customer data, sensitive documents, or back-end admin panels from being indexed.
- Prevent duplicate content: Stop bots from crawling printed page URLs, trailing pagination pages, etc. that generate thin or duplicate content.
Conclusion
I hope this beginner’s guide gave you a good understanding of exactly what the robots.txt file is, why it’s important for SEO, and how to properly configure it.
Remember, taking the time to optimize your robots.txt file can help focus crawl on your most important pages, prevent issues with private data leakage or duplicate content, and ultimately improve your search rankings!
The key things to remember are:
- Place robots.txt in your root domain folder
- Use “Disallow” directive to block pages selectively
- Don’t block your sitemap or vital content categories
- Test your file for errors before launching
Leverage your robots.txt file alongside other technical SEO best practices as part of an effective overall search strategy!
